Something that has continuously surprised me throughout my life (no matter how much I’ve been fully aware or accustomed to this) is that my child-self, the one who experienced much of my trauma and hurt and the engineer behind my defenses, has always been with me. At times, he’s been cowering and shaking, afraid of things my adult self knows I don’t need to be afraid of anymore. But, more often than not, he’s understood things deeper than my adult self. Much deeper. That’s why he built up our defenses in the first place.

My adult self is better at shrugging things off, at pushing pain and fear and distrust down, at swallowing hurt and doing “what needs to be done.” So, it came as a bit of a surprise to me that my adult self could ever understand that the shell that separated the adult me from the child me needed to come down.

The shell was there for a reason, one could even argue a good reason. There was pain, there was loss, there were questions whose only answers were hollow and deeply unsatisfying, “I don’t know” and “because that’s the way it is.” My child self knew enough to know that he wanted to grow and he felt that he couldn’t with all that brokenness. So, he built the shell around the broken parts, around all the unanswered questions. He did his best to let my adult self grow.

My adult self craved freedom, my child self craved security. So, the shell seemed like a good solution and we got a long way with that shell intact. We almost convinced ourselves that it made sense. But, eventually, we (all of me) were stuck. One part of me felt so much and the other felt so little. Neither was happy, neither was whole.

The shell needed to come down. We needed to see each other, we needed to trust each other, we needed to love and hold each other, we needed to be one. My child self needed to find the safety of acceptance in my adult self and my adult self needed to find the freedom to feel in my child self.

On Saturday, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania eleven Jewish Americans went to synagogue to worship and celebrate in the naming of a new baby and were shot and killed by a white man spewing hate. Last Wednesday, two black Americans were shot and killed at a grocery store in Louisville, Kentucky by a white man spewing hate after he had tried and failed to get into a predominantly black Baptist church. One of the slain at the grocery store was a grandfather whose grandson was with him. They were buying a poster board for a school project. Please envision these two scenes over and over and over again until your eyes well up and your heart aches.

Thirteen innocent Americans were killed last week because they were deemed as “others.” Their absences will forever be felt by their loved ones. Those who were there when the victims were slain will carry that trauma with them all their lives. They will relive that moment, hear the gunshots and see that grisly scene over and over. Their otherness was targeted. For a true democracy to exist, the citizens of that democracy need to exhibit one human trait: tolerance. That’s it. We don’t need love or even understanding. We just need tolerance. Tolerance for people that are different than us in color, in religion, in orientation, in gender, in language, in a myriad of other ways. Tolerance. That’s it. That’s the baseline, the very least we need for a democracy to exist.

But, if we want our democracy to be nourished and grow, we need to acquire another trait: humility. This is the understanding that it is possible for our thoughts and opinions to be wrong. This is not an easy trait to acquire. It takes practice and it can be painful. But, knowing that we can be wrong helps us look objectively at the problems before us. With humility, we can whole-heartedly approach any question or problem with the best of our knowledge and experience. But, when a new piece of valid information is presented to us that counters what we’ve always believed or assumed to be true, humility helps us accept it. Sure, sometimes that new information needs to be confirmed to be true. But, once it is confirmed, humility helps us accept it as truth even if obliterates a belief that we’ve clung to for safety for as long as we can remember. That’s the painful part. The nourishing and the growing part comes after we realize that true safety doesn’t come by clinging with white-knuckles to opinions or beliefs. It comes in the questioning and the listening and the changing. That’s how democracy is nourished and grows.

Of course, there are other nutrients like empathy, self-awareness and respect that would enrich our democracy to blossom and fruit even more. And, if we’re already carrying some of these other traits with us, that’s wonderful. But, here’s the thing. If we’ve got tolerance and humility, we can acquire all the other nutrients. But, our country goes nowhere without tolerance and humility.

​So, to be clear, if we are intolerant of others, we are an enemy of democracy. And, if we do not have humility, we are preventing our democracy from growing. This is true whether you are a regular citizen or the President of the United States of America.